There are many ways to use an interactive whiteboard for marking up information. The board can show a white background which allows the user to draw as if it were a regular whiteboard. Alternatively, a personal computer (PC) display can be shown on the background and the user can draw on the displayed image.
Using techniques such as the SMART Technologies, Inc. drivers and a SMART Board®, a user can display any background, including a word document, an image, a web page, a PowerPoint presentation, a video, an entire PC display or virtually anything else. When the user picks up a pen from the SMART Board® pen tray, the SMART Board® drivers capture the current screen and freeze it. Any strokes written by the user are overlaid on the frozen screen image. If a PC is connected to the SMART Notebook™ software, even if a video is running, the image is frozen while the user writes. Once the user indicates the she is finished drawing through the user interface, the screen image with the strokes is captured and stored and the screen is unfrozen.
When working with a Microsoft Word document, the user may desire to mark up the entire document with strokes. It is inconvenient to scroll the document, mark up a section, capture the screen, and then unfreeze the screen in order to scroll again. It would be much more convenient if the strokes could be put into the document in some way.
Since there are hundreds of thousands (or perhaps millions) of applications available for the PC, Mac and Linux platforms, and many different stroke input technologies, it is a complex problem to integrate stroke input techniques with every program.
What is needed is a way to capture strokes that can be associated with a document displayed on a stroke capture system that doesn't require modification of the application used to display the document. What is also needed is a way to mark up a computer screen without requiring the screen to stop updating or freeze.